@@ -130,15 +130,20 @@
<p>In addition to our classic workshops and general education alumni programs, we’ll also be attempting to ramp up our targeted workshops meant to fill talent gaps for specific organizations.</p>
<p>For example, we’ll run our second MIRI Summer Fellows Program, as well as a grant funded by the Future of Life Institute to help promising upcoming AI researchers think about AI safety. We’re in conversation with other organizations, and it’s our intention to have an increasing number of these workshops that focus on thinking skills needed for particular tasks in order to help fill critical gaps in important organizations on very small time horizons.</p>
<p>If funding permits and our experiments in this area go well, we intend to make these types of workshops more frequent, and perhaps expand on past success with programs like a European SPARC, and possible “summer camp” style events where we try to identify particularly talented high school students for training and recruitment into existential risk research.</p>
-<h4><a id="Increasingly_High_Quality_Instruction_208"></a>Increasingly High Quality Instruction</h4>
-<p>The split between Core and Labs doesn’t only allow focus on operations–it also allows our researchers to focus on developing the more advanced aspects of the art, more thoughtful public communication about the nature and nuances of rationality, and time to run higher variance pedagogical experiments.</p>
-<p>To those ends, Labs is currently developing:</p>
+<h4>Labs: Informal experimentation toward a better "Applied Rationality"</h4>
+<p>The split between Core and Labs doesn't only allow focus on operations--it also allows our Lab folk to invest in the informal experiments, arguments, data-gathering, etc. that seems, over time, to conduce to a better applied rationality.</p>
+<p>(This process is messy. Rationality today is not at the level of Newton. It isn't even at the level of Ptolemy, who, despite the mockability of the nested-epicycles method, could predict the motions of the planets with great precision. Rationality is more at the level of a toddler running around, putting everything in its mouth, and ending up thereby with a more integrated informal world-model by having examined many example-objects through several senses each. Our aim this year in Labs is basically to put many many things in our mouths rapidly, and to argue about models in between, and to especially expose ourselves to people who are working on issues that matter in already-very-competent ways who we can nevertheless try to make better, and to try in this way to get a better sense of the higher-end parts of "rationality".)</p>
+<p>Toward this end, Labs is currently:</p>
<ul>
-<li>The next generation of theory on rationality, with more robust and explicit models of the underlying mechanisms that create drive, scientific and epistemic skill, and relevant real-world competence;</li>
-<li>New written rationality sequences meant to expand upon, augment, and improve the original sequences that brought so many people into the culture of being “less wrong,” and oriented them around audacious goals that actually make a difference;</li>
-<li>Experimental workshops with new material and novel training approaches that may create major breakthroughs in our ability to transmit the core of what we mean when we say “rationality.”</li>
+<li>Offering one-on-one coaching to quite a few individuals who seem to be contributing to the world in a high-end way; and trying to figure out how they're doing what they're doing, and what pieces may help them contribute more;</li>
+<li>Working toward more robust and explicit models of the underlying mechanisms that create drive, scientific and epistemic skill, and relevant real-world competence (and how to intervene upon them);</li>
+<li>Creating new written rationality sequences meant to expand upon, augment, and improve the original sequences that brought so many people into the culture of being “less wrong,” and oriented them around audacious goals that actually make a difference;</li>
+<li>Planning experimental workshops of varied sorts, aiming to boost people further toward "actually useful skill-levels in applied rationality". </li>
</ul>
+<div>We are very excited, and expect that art development will be much easier now that we have a subteam who is free to just actually focus on it. (Last year, we were all doing workshop admissions, logistics, accounting, ...)</div>
+<div>
<h4><a id="Limitations_and_Updates_218"></a>Limitations and Updates</h4>
+</div>
<p>The primary limiting factor in these plans is our ability to attract a truly excellent sales person or team. With a sufficient workshop participation, cashflow bottlenecks are broken and we‘ll achieve economies of scale that will fundamentally transform our operations.</p>
<p>Failing that recruitment, the next best alternative is to grow organically through the MTP and other community programs. That is a much slower process, but pushes us in the same fundamental direction.</p>
<p>And as always, our plans coming into contact with the reality of 2016 will correctly cause us to update, iterate, and potentially pivot given new evidence and insight.</p>
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